D&D General WotC: 'Of Course We're Going To Do' Baldur's Gate 4

In an interview with The Game Business, Wizard of the Coast's president John Hight touched on the company's video games plans for Dungeons & Dragons.

Hight told interviewer Christopher Dring “Baldur’s Gate is an incredible game. And of course, we're going to do a successor."

Larian Studios, which made Baldur's Gate 3, has previously indicated that is not going to be involved in any potential sequels.

However, the previously announced game that game studio Giant Skull is currently working on is not Baldur's Gate 4. Hight says "This is not the successor to [Baldur's Gate 3]. We go to Stig and his team to tell an incredible story and bring D&D to a very broad audience. Ideally, the game will appeal to D&D players because it will help them realise their imagination. But it’s also going to hopefully appeal to people that love playing action games, that love the Jedi games, that love God of War games." Giant Skull's game will be a single-player action-adventure game.

Giant Skull's Stig Asmussen spoke a little about that--as yet untitled--game: "A lot of us have grown up on Dungeons & Dragons. And for me, with a new company, this is something that we’re good at. We're good at working with partners. We're good at capturing the spirit of those worlds. It wasn't something that we could just walk away from. It was actually a pretty easy [decision]... Dungeons & Dragons is the definition of a playground. When we had the meeting in Renton [Washington], my mind opened up to the possibilities of what we could do. There’s still a lot of things that we have to abide by. There’s the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons. There are the worlds, player agency and choice, building a party, actions have consequences… those types of things."

Giant Skull was founded by Stig Asmussen in 2023. Asmussen previously was the game director of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, as well as God of War 3.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Could the same argument not be said about BG1. Same with BG2.

No, it could not have been.

That wouldn't have made any sense at all. I think you're reading this and seeing a sentiment you don't agree with and not looking at the distinction I'm making.

When BG1 came out, companies pretty much never spent years and years working on a game, then ditched it because they had years to go. It was extremely rare. Now? It's very common, especially for corporate companies working on AAAs. Games get canned when they're 80, 90, even 99% finished.

So you absolutely could not have said that when BG1 came out, it would have been a lunatic thing to say, especially as Bioware were independent.

Same for BG2, plus, more importantly, the same company was working on it, so it would have been nonsensical.

If this opinion carried the day then we would never have seen BG3.

What opinion?

WotC didn't make BG3. Larian did.

I'm talking a big corporate company making games, not a hungry indie company who depend on it. WotC outsourced BG3 to Larian. Larian were a rapidly growing just-barely-AAA company who were attracting investments and BG3 was pretty make-or-break for them. They couldn't just cancel it halfway through and walk off, at least not without firing 90% of their staff and tanking the reputation and earnings of the management.

This is what you seem to be confused about - there's a profound difference between an independent company who have choices over what games they make, and when they "give up" on a game, and a studio owned by a publisher, where the publisher decides when they give up on the game, and where the publisher is a large corporate company with fairly regularly changing middle and upper management, where it may be politically beneficial for you to cancel the game your predecessor commissioned, because you can then say "Well it was costing us $30m a year and we'd been at it for 3 years and were expected to be working on it for another 2 years at least, and my projections said it had a 60% chance of not making that money back, so I saved us $60m+, please give me a bonus of a few percent of that for my heroism!", which is absolutely how it works in a lot of these places.

For me Bg4 doesn’t have to be better. It just has to be a good enjoyable game.

I think most people would agree.

But that doesn't change anything.

The issue is WotC seem to want to develop it in-house. As they're a fairly political (internally) corporate company with a long history of cancelling and ending and changing products when management changes (or even when it doesn't!), and owned by a very greedy and shortsighted company who will do LITERALLLY ANYTHING for a stock bump (Hasbro), it's vastly more likely that a BG4 will get cancelled during development. Many shareholders just don't pay very close attention and are extremely short-term-ish, and whilst "WotC cancels BG4" might cause a small stock drop for Hasbro, "Hasbro causes WotC to fire entire game studio" will usually cause a big stock bump.

 

[Piperken]

What could? BG3 was lighting in a bottle. WotC could do everything right and make one of the best games ever and still not match BG3.

A Larian production, like Ruin mentioned, might.

I just don't see how a BG4, esp. one handed to a different company could get close.

BG1-2 had interconnections between the two games. BG3 tied back to those two games through a few characters from those 1st two games, but delivered a whole slew of new memorable characters along with a cinema-like presentation.

In that sense, it was new even if the setting technically was the same.

One large difference is that there's been a shift in popular culture in more broadly recognizing and giving due credit to VAs involved in games, esp. when that work is extensive and well done. Before this was more niche (e.g. Oh, Nolan North, that's the guy from Uncharted, right?)

You'd need that sense of interconnections similar to what the 1st two games had; I have a difficult time imagining that w/o some or most of the cast.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Of course there is an opened door for a BG4 but the key is to know what is the right door to knock. It is a serious challengue for the chosen studio but the reward is not only economic but the prestige of the company.

My suggestion is the possible candidate before BG4 could publish other D&D videogame to show the level of talent.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Didn't Larian staff mention working with many people from WotC and that those no longer work at the company? That sounds like there were people at WotC that attributed to the games success.

People who are no longer there.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Instead of trying to re-make BG3, why don't they just focus on making a good game? Maybe it's a sequel, maybe it's not. But the good game goal should be first and foremost ahead of any other concerns. I personally would love to see a game set in Eberron, as it's my favorite setting, followed closely by Planescape and Spelljammer. But that's just my opinion. If they make a good game set in a world I'm not as fond of, maybe it would change my mind about that world.

Because the BG brand is where the money is, from the corp perspective.

 

[wicked cool]

Bg3 biggest selling points for me was

The writing- the choices /the party members etc- this can be duplicated as it’s not a video game thing. This was reworked over and over and I think wotc came back and said no on lots

The core 5e- this was d&d as close as you can get

The combat of the high ground etc- until this game 99% of d&d is flat

Graphically it wasn’t this huge achievement and the story after act 2 isn’t that great plus it took a long time for act 3 to come together

It’s funny we don’t know who contributed what from wotc. My guess is it’s the mechanics of d&d/lore and that can be replicated easily.


I often boot up Bg3 to test out a bard build or fighter etc plus a beard/hair combo for my next player character and then I move on to another game and come back.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Because the BG brand is where the money is, from the corp perspective.

Yup.

WotC top leadership don't understand why BG3 succeeded.

It wasn't because of the BG licence, as most people who played it had never played a BG game (and only some had heard of them before BG3). The average player is like, 28.

It wasn't because of D&D or the Forgotten Realms - they did help, but primarily because they moderated some of Larian's worst impulses (which are towards obscurantist, game-y-in-a-bad-way systems and ultra-maximum grimdark crapsack world settings, both of which I would argue hurt sales and mass market acceptance), and 5E is inherently a more accessible and engaging system than an awful lot of CRPGs use.

It was because it's an extremely playable, accessible, and well-written CRPG with an amazing cast of characters and really good production values. It was also helped by being multiplayer - a lot of people gifted a lot of others copies so they could, in theory, play with them (I suspect many of these never got used for MP but still, a sale is a sale).

WotC could achieve literally all of that if they wanted to focus on that, but given they aren't even trying to make a CRPG to develop that expertise, I don't think they're serious about it.

 

[DarkCrisis]

WotC execs are going to water it down for the masses like they did for 5E/5.5E. Expect a whole lot less gay, bdsm, sex, etc. The game was very adult, expect it tuned down to be more kid/masses friendly.

Though hopefully it also means not every party member is a hottie human or elf. Where my Dwarves at?

 

[Scribe]

For as good as BG3 was, I only played it once.

A BG4 is very possible, but I dont trust Wizards/Hasbro to do it in house, at all.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I think there is room in the world for a mature Dark Sun video game, where you start as a gladiator and end up ruling the City State, with a mix of Conan, Gladiator, and Dune. Use a really stylized (Brom-Like) art to make it look different from everything else on the stands.